Why some people have 4,294,967,295 posts.

Parent Cafe
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<p>Maybe everyone else already knows the answer to this, but I was curious about the random assignment of 4,294,967,295 posts to some posters. (I mean, a lot of us make a lot of posts, but 4,294,967,295 is, well, a little over the top.)</p>

<p>I didn’t notice at first that it was always exactly 4,294,967,295 posts, but there it is. Not 4,294,967,296, not 4,294,967,000. Always exactly 4,294,967,295. So I did what any normal person would do: I googled it. And found that 4,294,967,295 is 2 to the 32nd power, minus one. This has some significance to computers, apparently. 4,294,967,295 shows up in a lot of unexpected places where some other number really belongs. (4294967295 is also “the largest odd number of sides for which a regular polygon can be constructed using a compass and straightedge. This construction is possible only if the number is a product of distinct Fermat primes (3, 5, 17, 257 or 65537)” but I think that’s because of the 2 ^ 32 thing. Or maybe not.</p>

<p>Anyway, now you know as much as I do. Or maybe not.</p>

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<p>2^32-1 is the largest integer a byte can represent. thus if this is the case, people are just getting the “max” assigned to their post count instead of the actual # of posts.</p>

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<p>kluge-
I think you have too much time on your hands! LOL!</p>

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<p>

Actually, 2^8-1 is the largest a ‘byte’ can represent since there are only 8 bits in a byte. </p>

<p>Kluge’s magic number is FFFFFFFF hex which is an integer for most computers so it looks like the application has an uninitialized variable.</p>

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<p>Gee, and I thought I was special when I hit 900 posts. </p>

<p>Or maybe that should be: I thought I was pathetic when I realized I had posted here 900 times…</p>

<p>Actually I had no idea how many posts I had until someone pointed it out to me.</p>

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<p>“Actually, 2^8-1 is the largest a ‘byte’ can represent since there are only 8 bits in a byte.”
my bad… meant to say the largets number an <em>int</em> can represent (int is a primitive type in programming, 4 bytes. as the name implies, that’s how integers are usually represented. so it makes sense.)</p>

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<p>So what you’re all saying is that some people have this absurdly huge number of posts because of a computer glitch???</p>

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<p>Or, there’s a secret forum they’re all posting in that you’re not allowed to see. ;)</p>

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<p>Some people just type really fast. :)</p>

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<p>Maybe some people’s posts are so meaningful and insightful that they count exponentially more than everyone else’s. :D</p>

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<p>Why some people have 4,294,967,295 posts?</p>

<p>Because they have 1,223,456 children and have asked a lot of questions on CC about the application process.</p>

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<p>I heard it started with a few unqualified members with subprime posts. Then the moderators started speculating. Now it’s spreading to other, unmoderated forums. Some say a far-reaching crisis of board collapse is imminent.</p>

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<p>^^^^^ LOL These explanations are so much more fun! :)</p>

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<p>Also…over the years I have noticed that some posters always have zero posts! ??? anyone know why?</p>

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<p>Posts in the cafe dont count towards the post count. So if a poster is only posting in the cafes,they can have lots of posts but a post count of zero. For a brief while, I believe the political thread was accidentally crediting to the post count, but I think thats been changed.</p>

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<p>ohhhh. hmmm. posts in the cafe don’t count…sort of like “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas?” :)</p>

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<p>“The fundamentals of our CC Board are strong.”</p>

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<p>^^^ I think so too but just in case Congress should give the Federal moderators 700 billion posts and let them inject them in the forums they deemed appropriate. Some forums will have go into receivership and their posts transferred to the stronger ones (those we cannot afford to loose, say Harvard’s). They should also be able to acquire toxic posts and hold them until somebody can figure out their real value.</p>

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<p>This is actually not quite true. That number is the largest known possibility, but as the list of Fermat primes known is very short, it’s not saying too much. It’s possible (and even likely in some sense) that you can do constructions of regular polygons with more sides.</p>

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<p>The determination of the size of an unsigned int is compiler and machine dependent. The ILP64 model uses 64-bit integers. I can’t recall what ints were back in the 16-bit days.</p>